Tag Archives: Sarah

Sarah and that “God’s Story + My Story = One Story” Idea (4th Sunday after Pentecost, 6/21/2026)

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Readings (Track 1)

Sam Kamaleson, a pastor from the Indian subcontinent with whom I worked at World Vision, used to talk about God’s story (one hand) and my story (the other hand) becoming one story (fingers interlaced). Easier said than done; today’s lessons give us an opportunity to think about it.

God’s story. Three weeks ago (Trinity Sunday) our first lesson was the creation story, seven days of God declaring this is good, that is good, the whole thing very good. It’s a very different perspective than the Babylonian (creation itself and humans in particular formed from the corpses of defeated gods of chaos) or the Greek (only a second-rate deity would be fool enough to deal with matter). No: creation is good, the material world is good.

We can pick up the story in Eucharistic Prayer C:

From the primal elements you brought forth the human race, and blessed us with memory, reason, and skill. You made us the rulers of creation. But we turned against you, and betrayed your trust; and we turned against one another.

We should be, I think, surprised that the prayer doesn’t continue with “And so You pulled the plug on the whole thing” or “And so You decided to hang out with the dolphins for the next few thousand years.” Surprisingly, God calls Abraham and Sarah to be the beginning of a pilot project aimed at what the Jews call tikkun olam, repairing the world. God comes to Abraham and Sarah: what might we do together? God’s story + their story becoming one story. That’s the story contained in the Old Testament, the story rebooted when God takes on human flesh in Jesus, the story we enter with our baptism.

It’s probably fair to say that from Sarah’s perspective the project didn’t start out well. She had not borne Abraham an heir, to the point that, bowing to custom, she presented Abraham with her Egyptian slave Hagar so that she might produce an heir by proxy. Hagar conceived, and, understandably, passed up no chance to remind everyone that she was the birth mother of Abraham’s heir. So Sarah had an enemy, and there wasn’t a lot she could do about it. Until, finally, God promised her a son, and delivered on that promise Now Sarah can do something about her enemy. Foreshadowing the treatment her people will receive from the Egyptians some generations later, she demands that Abraham expel Hagar and Ishmael. And Abraham does so—only after receiving God’s promise to look after Hagar and Ishmael.

And in the story we’ve just heard God keeps that promise to Hagar, preserving Ishmael’s imperiled life as God will preserve Isaac’s imperiled life in the next story. “Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him fast with your hand; for I will make him a great nation.”

The Jews, descended from Isaac, and the Arabs, descended from Ishmael, already in the OT are often at odds. And here Sarah’s God is providing a well for Ishmael. The Jews have a legend about that: “the angels appeared against Ishmael before God. They said, ‘Wilt Thou cause a well of water to spring up for him whose descendants will let Thy children of Israel perish with thirst?’ And God: “well, yes.”

God’s story + my story = one story. For Sarah in this episode, not so much, because she’s hit one of the really difficult bits: that someone is my enemy doesn’t mean they’re God’s enemy, that God listens to me when I pray Ps 86 (today’s psalm) and listens to my enemy when they pray Ps 86.

This is a difficult enough bit that the OT keeps coming back to it. Here are a couple more stories.

Some generations later Moses has led Israel out of Egypt, and Joshua has just brought the people across the Jordan to take possession of the promised land. Reading from the fifth chapter of Joshua:

Once when Joshua was by Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing before him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you one of us, or one of our adversaries?” He replied, “Neither; but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come.” (Jos 5:13-14)

“Are you one of us, or one of our adversaries?” “Neither.”

Some centuries later the Northern Kingdom of Israel and Aram (modern Syria) are at war. In a legend from that period, the king of Aram learns that his recent raids have been unsuccessful because the prophet Elisha has been warning the Israelite king about them. He sends out a large force to surround Elisha’s city and capture Elisha. Elisha sees the force, and asks God to blind the soldiers. God does so, and Elisha leads them to the Israelite capital. At this point the Israelite king enters. Reading from the sixth chapter of 2 Kings:

When the king of Israel saw them he said to Elisha, “Father, shall I kill them? Shall I kill them?” He answered, “No! Did you capture with your sword and your bow those whom you want to kill? Set food and water before them so that they may eat and drink; and let them go to their master.” So he prepared for them a great feast; after they ate and drank, he sent them on their way, and they went to their master. And the Arameans no longer came raiding into the land of Israel. (2Ki 6:21-23)

So when Jesus talks about loving one’s enemies as an integral part of what God’s kingdom is about, this isn’t new. Jesus is simply reporting how he’s observed the Father acting “for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous”—not to mention Hagar, the reply to Joshua, Elisha’s treatment of the Aramean raiders.

So when Jesus sends his disciples out to announce this kingdom, he understandably anticipates opposition, because everyone knows that right-thinking people try to help their friends and hurt their enemies. Right-thinking people will take Barabbas over Jesus any day.

“But this love of enemies business can’t be that important to God. If it were, God would impose it.” But that takes us back to the creation story. God thinks that human freedom is good. God thinks that the church’s freedom is good. So God does what God can do, like the woman in one of Jesus’ parables, putting leaven in the dough in the hope of the whole thing rising. God continues to stretch out the now nail-pierced hand to us: how can we make My story and your story one story?

God’s story; my story; one story. There are many ways that invitation will come to us in the coming week. Some of them may have to do with how we choose to respond to our enemies. May our choices bring God joy.

Time, trust, patience (3rd Sunday after Pentecost, 6/14/2026)

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Readings (Track 1)

As summer fast approaches, our lakes become inviting in a new way. For, what do you need to swim? [Water.] What happens if you don’t have any water? [You don’t swim.] So if God came to me and said “You’re going to be a great swimmer,” a fair question would be “Where’s the water?”

This is more or less the situation Abraham was in at the beginning of today’s text. At the beginning of Abraham’s story God promised “I will make of you a great nation.” He was 75 then, and that was 24 years ago. Since then he and Sarah have had exactly…zero children. To make matters worse, his name would have been a sort of standing joke. God had insisted on changing his name to “Abraham,” which was explained as “father of a multitude of nations.”

How many of us have been praying for something for a long time? St. Paul called Abraham the father of all who believe, and he’s also our father in this sense, that he knows what it is to pray for something for a very long time. And one of the reasons this story’s here is to remind us that God regularly works with time frames that we find uncomfortable, painful, and completely inexplicable.

This is particularly difficult for us in this culture, which demands everything now, if not yesterday. So living as a Christian in this culture means being more than a little counter-cultural, being willing to live sometimes for long stretches in the tension between what we are asking God to do and what God is doing.

Anyhow, back to Abraham. After all this waiting, all this predictable scorn, we might expect someone more than a little anti-social. So it might surprise us a little to watch Abraham receiving the three strangers. On the one hand, he is showing the hospitality that custom demands. The frontier between the town and the steppe demands that sort of hospitality, or else no one lasts very long. On the other hand, it is hospitality beyond what convention required, generous hospitality, extravagant hospitality. Watching Abraham and Sarah swing into action we’re given a glimpse as to why God chose them to start a new and decisive chapter in human history.

The narrator has told us what Abraham doesn’t know: these aren’t any three men, but the Lord God. (The narrative, incidentally, goes back and forth between Abraham relating to three and Abraham relating to one, which has lead Christians to see here an early revelation of the Holy Trinity.) Watching Abraham relate to the Stranger or Strangers, we’re reminded of a theme we meet repeatedly in Scripture: how we relate to other people determines how we relate to God. We human beings are simply not designed so we can run one program for relating to people, and another program (a much better program) for relating to God. We’ve got one program that runs for persons, God & others included, so the Judeo-Christian tradition has always encouraged us to pay careful attention to it. This, by the way, is the pragmatic reason for the command to love our enemies. How we treat our enemies spills over into how we treat those we love.

The meal conversation transitions into a conversation about a son, and Sarah, offstage, cannot contain her laughter. The LORD said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too wonderful for the LORD?” “Is anything too wonderful for the LORD?” That’s a question the text puts pretty directly to Abraham and Sarah and us.

It’s easy to answer that question in the abstract. But the important questions are never abstract. That situation, that wound, I’ve been praying about for years, if not decades: is it too difficult for the Lord? It’s so tempting to reduce the tension: God doesn’t care. The situation doesn’t matter. We don’t matter. And any of these moves erode the generosity displayed in our first reading.

You may recall how Scott Peck began his classic The Road Less Traveled. “Life is difficult.”[1] But, Peck observes, since we don’t like difficult, we often opt for work-arounds that end up compounding the difficulty. You may remember the sitcom Cheers. In a frequent story line a difficulty appears, the regulars opt for an avoidance strategy, that strategy consumes increasing amounts of energy and resources until it all comes crashing down, the final scene including tacit agreement to learn nothing from the experience. Sounds rather like last week’s “She’s my sister” episode.

As Christians, life is difficult also because we confess “God is faithful” and “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day” (2 Pet. 3:8). To live as daughters and sons of Abraham and Sarah is to guard this tension: it’s part of our identity.

Is anything too wonderful for the LORD? The answer for Abraham and Sarah comes the next year and its narrative is included in the Old Testament reading. Sarah —well, Abraham and Sarah, but particularly Sarah— has a son who is named “Isaac,” which simply means “Laughter.” The laughter of Sarah’s incredulity has become the laughter of her joy, the sort of joy we also see when a child’s put in a bathtub or a swimming pool. Yes, this family is going to become a family of excellent swimmers.

Now, having heard again this rather bracing story that moves from desolation and barrenness to joy and fertility and in the process challenges us to more faith, more faithfulness, we could easily stop.

But the combination of this story and the Gospel suggests a further step. I’ve read the Old Testament lesson as an invitation to learn from Abraham and Sarah: learn from them the wonderful things that God can do, and imitate their faith, their faithfulness. The Gospel reading with the commissioning of the disciples suggests that we go back to the Genesis story and wonder about how we’re called to imitate the three Strangers. Because that’s what Jesus is sending them and us out to do: go to those who’ve had every reason to give up hope with the words of power and deeds of power that will free them to hope and believe. As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. And we proclaim this good news in hope, for not all the sick among us are cured, and, barring Jesus’ return, these bodies too will die. This is part of what it means to be sons and daughters of Abraham. And even as we proclaim the good news, we keep the welcome mat out for the Three Strangers who—often in ways beyond our imagination—continue to show up at our doorstep.

[1] Peck continues: This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”